Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to social networking and, in particular, to systems and methods for serving meaningful “real-world” recommendations.
Description of the Related Art
Social networking services include social utilities that track and enable connections between users (including people, businesses, and other entities), which have become prevalent in recent years. In particular, social networking services allow users to communicate more efficiently information that is relevant to their friends or other connections in the social networking service. Social networking services typically incorporate a system for connecting users to content that is likely to be relevant to each user. For example, users may be grouped according to one or more common attributes in their profiles, such as geographic location, employer, job type, age, music preferences, page likes, followers, or other attributes. Users of the social networking service and/or external parties can then use these groups to customize or target information delivery so that information that might be of particular interest to a group can be communicated to that group.
Furthermore, advertisers wishing to use members' affinities, or common attributes, as targeting criteria for advertisements have difficulty placing their ads in contextually relevant areas, a problem called “ad blindness.” As a result, members are inundated with advertisements for products unrelated to the context of what the members are currently viewing. Thus, these ads are largely ignored by members of a social network.
Despite prior art designed to increase the relevance of this information, the systems and methods of the prior art do not achieve the desired outcome, and continue to overwhelm the user with large amounts of non-relevant information. Additionally, methods for indicating user interests including page likes and followers on social networks today are largely comprised of non-useful and non-meaningful data for real-world (offline) interactions, thus the power for directing content, recommendations, and advertising that promotes real world interactions is greatly limited.